Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) regions restrict the ability to write data into its current location. This restriction is due to the size of SMR regions and a magnetic head that reads and writes the date into the tracks of an SMR region. The magnetic head is wider than the target track width it writes to, causing this difficulty. The traditional approach for sequential write operations is to write the first few tracks of sequential data into a scratch region, creating a validity hole in the data's original location. Data is then written in place in the validity hole. In this implementation, each sequential write will result in additional utilization of scratch space.
Such techniques for handling various writes and re-writes of data in a shingled region of an SMR hard disk drive (HDD) face numerous inefficiencies. It may be difficult to rewrite the shingled region without writing additional tracks to an E-region of the SMR HDD. Further, E-regions may contain many stale copies of the same logical sectors, which may require compaction to free. These writes may further be encountered in looped or repeated benchmarks, reducing overall efficiency of the writes. Further, the initial sequential write may be fragmented, potentially leading to a degradation in read performance.